The Complete Guide to Writing Up a Successful UX Proposal

Whether you’re working on a website, network, product or service, the user experience you provide is one of the most important considerations you need to be thinking about.

A UX proposal is the process and plan of how to change, upgrade, or improve the said experience.

Within a successful proposal, everybody involved in the project will be able to know exactly what’s going on, and all departments can effectively cross-communicate to ensure that everything is carried out and processed efficiently and to the highest quality with minimal risk of mistake.

Even this alone shows the importance of a successful UX proposal, by how exactly do you go about doing this? Today, we’re going to explore everything you need to know about writing a comprehensive UX proposal, providing you with a complete guide to make sure you get it right first time.

When is a UX Proposal Required?

Typically, a UX proposal will be used to address a problem or to improve a certain feature which ultimately enhances the user’s final experience. For example, you may have a navigation bar in on your website, or a switch on one of your products.

However, once you’ve identified a problem and plan to make a chance, make sure you don’t jump straight into writing a proposal. Firstly, you’ll want to make sure everyone’s on board, the idea is cleared with the appropriate people and managers, and the business conditions are right in terms of time and money.

Writing a proposal can be a time-consuming venture when done properly, so you’ll want to make sure you’re not wasting your time writing a proposal that doesn’t need to be written. When you’ve identified a problem and been given the green light, then you can start writing.

Defining the Purpose

The first thing you want to when writing your proposal is making sure that the final outcome is clearly defined. This is so everybody involved in the project is on the same page, and there’s no doubt on why the project is happening and what the end goal is.

“In some cases, you may need to research this to see whether there’s a problem. If you’re testing your website, you may need to interview testers and users to see whether there’s a problem in the first place, or you may need to run experiments, such as A/B testing,” — Mary Gooch, a designer at Boomessays.

Research & Details

Once the issue has been identified, and your goals are clearly set, it’s always a good idea to add this information to the beginning of your proposal. This way, if someone new is to join the project in the future and needs to understand where the problem has arisen from, they can simply refer to this section.

Structuring Your Proposal

Next, before you jump into the actual writing and adding the details of your proposal, you’ll want to think about how you’re going to structure your proposal. Doing this early will save you time later on since you won’t have to keep moving things around.

For this, make sure every section is broken down into a clearly-labeled area where anybody will be able to find what they’re looking for with ease. Working in chronological order is a fair way to approach this, but it’s completely up to you.

As an example, you may follow this structure;

Contents

Introduction

Goals of the project

History of the proposed element of change

The process

Departmental information

The final project

Admin process

Deadlines & Budget

Notes

Of course, what you include in your structure will solely depend on what your proposal is and what you set out to achieve, and you may like to add and take things away as you see fit. You’ll also want to make sure your proposal is accurate now and as you write it.

Here are some writing tools that can help you create a successful UX proposal;

Use these online writing guides to improve your writing skills for a more comprehensive UX proposal.

Highlight the End Goal

Perhaps you’re improving a feature on your website with the aim of boosting sales or allowing people to navigate your website easier which will hopefully improve the amount of time people are going to stay on your website.

Whatever it is you’re trying to achieve, you need to ensure this is outlined in your proposal. This is important since you’ll need to be able to track the success of your project to ensure it was a success, the desired outcome was met, and you can evaluate the process to improve it next time.

Explaining the Final Product(s)

While you want to be able to track the end goal of the project to see what benefits the improvement will make to your business, product or service, you will obviously also need to highlight the actual changes you’re going to be implemented on a physical level.

This section should include what the UX element is going to change, what each department or team member needs to be produced and what steps need to be taken in order to fulfill this changes and improvements.

The more detail you can include in this section, the more beneficial your proposal will be since there’s such little room for error. However, this will only be the case if you make sure that each department is present and providing input into this section.

Generating Assumptions

The assumptions section of your proposal is perhaps one of the most important yet remains one of the vaguest. This area details situations and events that could occur during the duration of the project, but there’s no proof that it will do so, although it’s simply keeping you prepared for the worst-case scenario.

“An example of a good assumption could be that you will be testing your prototype changes for four weeks and this will be limited to four weeks. In this time, you will have space for a maximum of five revisions over the course of three weeks,” — Taylor Mendes, a tech writer for Big Assignments.

Of course, it may take six revisions to get your prototype to where you want it to be, hence why this is an assumption. These, however, are still necessary since you’ll need to budget for time and cost, and you’ll need to be able to set goals for people to stick to, so everything is completed in a timely manner.

This is also necessary for helping you track the progress of the project, so you know you’re on time and whereabouts everything is. It’s important to set up accurate and slightly challenging assumptions so everything can move at pace but don’t make the tasks impossible that the project is bound to fail.

Setting Deadlines & Budgets

With everything else in mind considered, you should now be able to accurately estimate and set deadlines for each stage of the project, as well as being able to estimate the budget. You’re going to want to be strict within this section, but as mentioned above, it’s important not to set your deadline too short or your budget too low that the project is guaranteed to fail.

Once this is set, be sure to proofread and check through your proposal to ensure everything is correct. When completed, you’ll have a successful UX proposal ready at your service!

This article is a guest post from Grace Carter. Grace is a tech editor at OX Essays and AustralianHelp websites. She curates blog content, manages online presentations and works on UX improvement. Additionally, Grace develops online courses on business writing at Paper Fellows academic service.